


But You Can't Go Home Twice

by crewdlydrawn



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), The Dark Knight Rises
Genre: Also Ross, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, And Ramirez, Cop!John, League of Shadows reimagined, M/M, Part of a scene effectively reads like dissociation, Size Difference, Smoking, batman exists but isn't present, thinly veiled political commentary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 13:03:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14874248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crewdlydrawn/pseuds/crewdlydrawn
Summary: Our boy John Blake is on a mission again, this time to investigate the centuries-old battling between faerie court factions–-’Seelie’ the light, and ‘Unseelie’ the dark–-that affects the rest of Gotham City and its citizens.  With tensions rising, Blake sets himself on a daring path that won't turn out quite how he expects.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinkys_creature_feature](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkys_creature_feature/gifts).



> For [Pinkys-Creature-Feature](http://pinkys-creature-feature.tumblr.com).
> 
> Happy 2018 TDKR Gift Exchange!  
> (If unsatisfactory, I promise I’ll write you an epilogue, my dear. ♥)

The king is dead.  Long live the king.

Few traditions were strictly kept for those sworn to the Unseelie Court.  As far as any outsiders knew, there was no physical castle, and had not been for centuries.  Membership had become more abstract than a blood oath, a magical seal, and typically only required a tattoo, in more recent times.  Decisions for the good of the masses were no longer subject only to the whim of a single high council.  One thing that remained, however, was the king.  There was always a king.  To depose the king was to kill the king, and to kill the king was to take his place as ruler.

The king is dead.

For the first time in centuries, the king’s murderer had refused the throne, rejected the ways of the Court, and had abandoned its people.

Long live the king.

__________*__________*__________

“I’m getting too old for this shit.”  More drama than truth, John’s partner’s words had become a mantra of sorts for him, of late.  “I’m gonna be forty soon, Blake,” Ross reminded him, his knee pressed to the mid-spine of the young man they’d just chased down, his breath quick and uneven, “ _forty_.  That’s desk-time, for humans.”

John only shook his head, offering a grim smirk.  His knees were holding down struggling thighs as his hands fought stubborn wrists into dura-plastic cuffs.  This kid had been quicker than they’d anticipated, and was the key they’d been waiting for and watching over, making him important enough to run after. 

“They’ll make you wait ‘til half a century, and you know it,” John grunted along with the concerted effort of hauling their perp to his feet.

Sharp teeth snapped towards Ross, brightly-hued eyes flashing in anger, and John gave a quick, harsh yank backwards on his arms.  “Hey, none of that now, Pointy,” he ordered, well aware that the epithet would only earn _him_ the growl and gnash, next.  That shifted focus allowed Ross to start them back to the squad car, where they fairly tossed the kid into the plastic-coated reinforced steel cage that enveloped the rear passenger area.  A strong human could maybe kick out a mesh screen, crack a civilian-standard window, but Peace Service vehicles had to anticipate that not every rider would _be_ human.  With a set of long-tipped ears, a soft blue hue to the skin around his hair, and those canines, their passenger wouldn’t have even passed for human in a dark bar without using some sort of glamour.

Why he _wasn’t_ using any was the current mystery, but definitely not worth the trouble of asking.

“I’m gonna take Lumbard,” John announced in the same motion of flicking the cruiser’s left blinker on.

“Uh…”  Ross glanced pointedly behind them.  “We’re heavy, man, so why don’t we just head straight back to the station?”

Despite the entirely logical protest, John shook his head.  “I’d rather finish the route, make sure we get all the credits in.”  Straightening the wheel, he tapped the transponder set into the dashboard in front of them.  Thanks to active GPS and a historic lack of trustworthy officers, their every move was watched and calculated, quantified to make up their pay. 

“Right, on a normal day, sure, but we’re _heavy_.”

John smiled a tight pull of closed lips.  “It’s not much of a catch-bonus if we’re losing regular operating credit to pull it in, now is it?”  Ross didn’t offer any arguments, as expected.  While John could more easily skip out on a bonus, Ross had a kid on the way and two already in grade school—he’d need as much as they could grab. 

Lumbard Street was a route squad teams typically picked last, and for immediately evident reasons.  On any given day, there was already at least one car on fire, overturned, or actively being stripped along the sidewalk.  Three different gangs had staked their claims to pieces of the stretch of pavement, each backed—and not subtlely—by a different mob presence within the larger city.  The effect wasn’t uncommon, but on a relatively short street, it was compounded.  Only one of the gangs were interspecies, one of the very few city-wide, and while John was loath to ascribe the word at all, they were his favorite.  He knew they had ties that strung all the way up to Unseelie support, but any group affiliated with _Seelies_ were just an extra layer of asshole. 

“You wanna start talking, now, Petri?” John aimed back behind their cage screen.  “I’m sure some of your buddies in the next few blocks would love to know you’re on the move…”  He let the concept hang in the air, aware that their charge was aligned with groups sworn fealty to the Seelie Court.

Rather than say anything, Petri sank lower in the molded plastic seat, glaring hotly at the rearview mirror any time John glanced back.

“Maybe leave the guy alone ‘til we get back, Blake?  Unless you want to explain whatever he breaks on the way.”

Riding down slowly, they weren’t ignored, but they were left alone.  With no reason big enough to stop, much to the relief of Ross’ blood pressure and Petri’s hisses, soon enough they were pulling into the back of the station, a comfortably empty alley that let them avoid street-side eyes.  Their passenger had been unusually quiet for the trip, but tried to bolt the second the squad car door opened, sending the heavy swing of its fiberglass coated metal frame straight into Ross’ chin as John slammed the guy into the back wall. 

“Now that’s not very nice, is it,” he taunted, glancing back to make sure Ross was okay before starting inside with a firm grip on both of the kid’s upper arms. 

“Like I said,” Ross wiped a small line of blood from his jawline, “ ‘too old for this shit.’ ”

If all had gone according to plan, John and Ross’ pickup would have sat in a holding cell for a day or so, and they’d have gotten a chance to take a crack at interrogating him for the information it was rumored he had on Court advancements into the city.  While bad blood had existed for centuries, occasional flare-ups over generations had laid waste to cities, even small countries, in the past.  Political tensions on the rise, social media campaigns calling for eradication of entire species, and heated confrontations on street level all pointed to larger movements behind the scenes.  Informants were more important than ever.

Questions and the appropriate files already prepared at his desk, John barely got their catch into the main cell in the center of the station before it all went to hell.

All at once, every available scrap of attention was sucked towards the front doors as a sleek-dressed individual swept into the station, not even having touched the outer doors to open them.  They spoke with the captain, walking right up to her without allowing themselves to be stopped.  It was almost as if no one even tried, or as if the thought of trying was stricken from their minds before it could even form.  Despite not being able to overhear the conversation, John knew it wasn’t good, and that it wasn’t good for _them_. 

With minimal struggle from the captain followed immediately by a tired manner of acceptance, a signal was given to the handling officers next to John and Ross.  Their perp was being let go.  Not that _he_ seemed happy about that.  Once the door opened and he didn’t walk out, the captain cleared her throat, and the two officers who had operated lockup for them had to walk into the cell and physically pull Petri out.  Pale and aimed briefly at their smooth-haired visitor, his face registered more fear than he’d given John and Ross for hunting him down.  Even so, he was guided out of the building, followed in a glide by the fae who’d ordered his release. 

“Are we even going to talk about this?” John called over, earning himself a chilly glance from the doorway, sending a shiver up his spine.

“Do remember,” a smooth voice issued back from the door, seeming nearly to fill the entire floor rather than simply aiming for John’s ears, “who pays your donated salary, _officer_.”  With nothing else, the fae jerk disappeared out onto the street.  _Taxes,_ John wanted to fling back, _and it’s DETECTIVE,_ but he neither had the time nor the chance.

Not even bothering with a debrief, unnecessary in these situations, the captain merely sighed and headed back into her office, leaving John to slam his half-started paperwork back down on his desk in frustration.

“God _DAMN_ it!”

“John,” Ross warned, despite no other eyes or faces bothering to turn towards their desks.  Neither his outburst nor the reasons behind it were anything the rest of the room hadn’t seen.  “It’s no use.  You saw how they looked, the way they came in…”  And he knew it, too, but that didn’t mean that he _liked_ it.  Gotham may have been a Consolidated City with a multi-species council and an unaffiliated peace-keeping police service, but that didn’t mean the Courts didn’t also have their own pull that trickled all the way down to the street-level. 

It was hard to get proper police work done when the very people being investigated had the power to shut that investigation down.  While that happened with humans, too—certain human families had been operating a mob rule of Gotham’s streets for generations—when it was fae or elves, the scale was grander, and the possibility of fighting back dropped from slim to none.  Two thirds of Gotham’s council were fae, and they just had to deal with that until the next election cycle, and then hope enough humans braved the risk of running for office.  That didn’t mean John had to like _that,_ either.

Leaving a protesting Ross behind him, he marched himself into the Captain’s office, latching the door closed behind him.  Despite the breach in protocol, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, hoping for as much leeway as he could earn.

“The Seelies won’t help us,” Captain Ramirez answered his unasked question before even turning her chair around to face John, “they hate Neutrals just as much as Unseelies do.”  Hands first scrubbing at her face before smoothing stray strands back towards a hairband, Ramirez shook her head.  “Best to leave it, Blake.”

“Leave it,” John repeated flatly, “when we were so close to getting information?  To finally fleshing out this case?”

Ramirez stood, flipping a folder shut on the desk.  “That case is closed, _officially_ ,” she added when John began to protest.  “If we’re not careful, if we don’t watch our steps, this whole city will be swallowed up by Court terrorism, and we’ll be sucked right back into their pointless wars.  And it is always _us_ who pay the price, who get trampled on.”

“Right,” John agreed, though turning the argument back, his hands brought forward, “which is all the more reason for us to figure out their next moves, to maybe stop them before they start, for once.”

“Son,” Ramirez began, a word and a tone that, employed by authorities, by older generations who only saw the older ways, was never a good sign, “you can save the speech.  Nobody here likes the Court politics, same as you, but we’re not declaring war on _them_ by shaking the hornet’s nest, you get that?”

John grit his teeth.  “Yes, sir.”

Ramirez stepped around the desk, into the space of floor in front of John.  “I want you to be clear on this.  You go out there, messing with Court business, and you are out there on your _own_ , you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do your beat, write tickets, I don’t care.  Work on that stock of cases on your desk, not threats that don’t exist yet.”

‘Yet’ was a word that, in the Captain’s mouth, never quite held possible meaning that a thing _could_ happen, only that it wasn’t happening at the moment.  If it wasn’t trouble _today_ , then it wasn’t _real_.  While that may have been a solid method of keeping out of trouble for some, John knew it would solve none of the underlying problems.

Even so, he nodded his obedient agreement, leaving the office quietly and ignoring the furtive glances of other officers who, despite the closed door, knew exactly how the conversation had gone.  John found himself intensely grateful that he had the next two days off.


	2. Chapter 2

The prevailing theory was that The Batman was fae.

                “I mean, who _actually_ dresses up like a bat?” people would say.

Theatricality and glamour went as hand-in-hand as anything else, after all.  A man using the cover of night to beat up on criminals would need to be comfortably well-off to not need a day job, and most of the city’s elite were fae or elven, and elves couldn’t conjure an illusion to save their lives, just as humans couldn’t.  That is, aside from rumors of humans with rare, latent abilities, or illegally-begotten mixed bloods.  But the latter were rare, and the former might not have been real at all.

The Batman was definitely fae.  All the best theorists said so.

 _Which_ fae was the only mystery anyone claimed to remain, and whether he could even possibly claim loyalty to a Court.

__________*__________*__________

Revisiting a childhood home would have the potential to stir nostalgia in anyone, but for John, that first touch of fingertips to the bannister leading up into Saint Swithin’s Home for Boys was always a lightning rod to sounds, smells, and emotions that had never had the common decency to remain politely in the past.  Like apparitions, visual memories of kids he once knew as peers walked and ran intermingled with the present flow of youngsters currently living inside the orphanage’s walls. 

Most religious-affiliated homes and schools in Gotham did not openly discriminate their entrances based on species, but St. Swithin’s stood out for taking kids from areas known to be sworn to Courts.  It was messy, and some would definitely say not worth the trouble, but Father Reilly had been in charge since John had been young, and it was his mission to help as many kids as they could.  Even mixed-blood kids occasionally made their way behind those walls, John knew, even though when it _did_ happen, it happened without announcement, without any evidence that would have outed the illegal union of the child’s parents. 

Maybe Fr. Reilly was grim about the chances for the city to reconcile its differences, but he did what he could.  The priest was the first stop John made each time he reentered the building.  Other staff had been more involved day-to-day when he had been living there, but since he’d left, Fr. Reilly had been his main contact. 

“Knock-knock?”  The words accompanied the action as he filled the doorway to the man’s office.

Phone receiver at his ear, Fr. Reilly motioned John inside, the last wave of his hand aimed at the two chairs in front of his desk.  “Thanks, Sharon,” he spoke into the mouthpiece, “let us know when the court office’s packet is ready, and we’ll work things out on our end… Yep… uh-huh… you, too, bye-bye.”  Hanging up and scribbling a note on a scrap of paper, Fr. Reilly turned his attention to John as he sat and settled.  “Good to see you, Blake.  How’ve you been?”

For most people, those words were more likely to constitute an automatic greeting, one not even necessitating a response, but at the very least the priest put forth an effort to make it seem he truly cared about the answer.  Because of that and that only, John tended to reply honestly. 

“Alright, I guess,” he started, but it was clear that wasn’t going to be enough.  Raking fingers through his hair, John let out a slow, purposeful breath.  “It’s… been a rough week, father.”

Fr. Reilly nodded, arms resting on the desktop.  “I’ve been hearing some tensions around these neighborhoods, though we always do.” 

“Yeh,” John more snorted than spoke, “that and politics being a bi—”  Looking up sharply, he offered a sheepish chuckle in reply to the father’s raised eyebrows.  “—I mean, being… troublesome.”

“Mm-hmm,” Fr. Reilly hummed, far too used to John’s untamed mouth.  At least, now, it didn’t earn him a night alone with his rosary or a mouthful of soap.  “I’m sure you’ll work yourself through it,” he assured, a vote of confidence rather than a platitude, “but for now, why not go see the kids?  I know you don’t come here just to talk to an old man like me.”  With a one-handed shooing motion in the general direction of the door and the rest of the building, he smiled, and with a polite farewell, John left the office to see what the kids were up to.

The orphanage as a whole housed up to three dozen kids of varying ages, but some of their classes were grouped together rather than separated by grades.  John’s visit had coincided with cultural history, which found most of the boys in the larger common room across the hall from Fr. Reilly’s office.  Not wanting to disrupt the middle of their lesson, John slipped into the back of the room through the open door, sliding into a seat along the back wall. 

A diagram dominated the white board by Brother Michael, who’d been leading the lesson.  Two circles sat at either end of the board, one labelled ‘Seelies’ and the other ‘Unseelies,’ with a third circle stretched between—though notably not touching either—demarked ‘Neutral’.  John was very familiar with the illustration style, and its point, having sat through enough such lessons in his youth.  Nothing significant had changed, since, yet the same lessons were doled out weekly. 

“None of this matters, anyway,” piped up an older boy towards the outside of the group, “humans are better ‘cause we were here first, and we’ve always been here.”

“Ah,” Brother Michael interrupted even as the boy—Nico, John recalled—started to continue, “well, you’re partially correct.”  John watched a few petite elven kids stare at their hands, avoiding eye contact with the rest of the room.  “It’s true that humans developed here, but we were by no means _always_ here.  In fact,” standing from the stool he’d occupied before John had entered, Brother Michael stepped over to lean against the wall Nico sat near, though still at the front corner of the room.  Arms folded loosely, he kept his voice casual, even after meeting John’s gaze for a moment.  “All current anthropological evidence points to the appearance of fae on Eia around the same time as Homo Sapiens.”  With a smile aimed at peeking, nervous glances, some of the tensions eased out of the room’s atmosphere.  “Elves followed shortly after, to our records, but fae chronology shows their species developing right alongside fae, both in Sidhe and Eia.  The point is,” Brother Michael moved back to the center of the room, pointedly drawing a circle around all three on the board, despite not quite being the same thing, “none of you, or us, are below one another, and none above.”

“Then why’ve we got a fae council?”

“It’s _joint_ , Roman,” corrected Jimmy, one of the younger boys John had been working with, of late. 

Brother Michael held up his hands, and the boys quieted.  “It is joint, and yes, it’s also mostly fae right now, but in other cities, it’s all human, more mixed, elven, or even all fae.  But the point is, your blood, your skin, your DNA,” he pointed around the room, at different heritages each time, “these are not things that _separate_ you.  All of those things we construct for ourselves—nature has not set us apart on its own.”  With Nico trying again to argue, Brother Michael simply continued, finishing with a safety talk that even John could recognize took some of the point away from the previous discussion, despite both being necessary. 

Dismissed, half a dozen boys crowded around John, asking questions all at once about where he’d been this week, if he’d had to get in any fights, had he fired his gun—“Not appropriate,” Brother Michael called over while clearing the board—and, the loudest of all questions, if he’d seen the Batman.

“The _what_?” John shot back.

“OMIGOD,” Antony rushed out, pulling a folded up newspaper page from his pocket, “it’s all the news is talking about.”

“Definitely not _all_ ,” Brother Michael’s sing-song corrected.

“Okay, not _all_ ,” Antony continued, “but the _best_ parts are all talking about _this_ guy.”  With a dirty-nailed finger pointing to the front page picture spread, the boy hung the paper directly in front of John’s face.  On the crumpled sheet was a headline that read, ‘FAE OR FICTION?’ above a blurry photo of a vaguely pointy silhouette halfway behind a building.  Apparently, a figure had been spotted in the city, dressed like some sort of bat creature, beating up on criminals and ‘rescuing’ citizens in touch situations.

“Uhh…”

“Is the GCPS doing something about it?”                               “Are you helping him?”                

“Do you know who he is?”                                           “He’s obviously some rich fae.”                

“Not _obvious_ , or they’d have caught and exposed him by now.”

“Boys,” Brother Michael interrupted their peppering of questions and overlapping comments, walking over to take the paper and re-fold it.  Much to Antony’s relief, it was handed back.  “If you’d like Detective Blake to hang around more than five minutes, you’re going to have to let him respond… or at least breathe.”

Offering a grateful smile to Brother Michael, John ruffled Antony’s hair.  “We’ll talk more when I know… anything at all about it, okay?  For now,” standing, yawning, glancing at the clock, he made a show of stretching, “it’s getting late, so I guess I’m too tired to beat you all in basketball… _maybe_.”  Without any further convincing necessary, he was tugged bodily to the stairs for the half-roof access, where a hoop hung on the building’s upper wall.

__________*__________*__________

That night, John’s eyes refused to rest themselves.  He’d left his police scanner on, but that was most nights, and regardless, the volume was low.  Still, he could hear it from the fire escape landing.  Blowing his smoke out slowly, he watched the grid of the city lights as it blurred and reemerged through the cloud.  At any given moment, that same city was tearing itself apart the same as it was trying to bring itself together.  Half the time, his mind felt every bit at odds as the people he tried to serve, to protect.

Trying to keep peace through conventional means was nearly impossible.  The best he hoped for each day was to be a stop-gap, a band aid, at most a tourniquet to stem the flow of chaos from Courts battling their way over everyone else.  Not that humans were innocent of any of it.  Despite not being let into the Seelie Court, they still swore themselves by the dozens as if it would ever even matter for them.

Lighter flame flicked open and millimeters from the open end of a fresh cigarette, John froze as a call came over the scanner, indicating a brawl downtown, near the docks.  He wasn’t on-call, nor was that his assigned district most days, but it _was_ a heavily Unseelie-based area.  Local human-led mob families typically pledged more resources to the ‘dark’ Court, supplying them in turn for blind eyes on their own comings and goings.  A fight there could either be a quarrel over details or another target by Seelie sympathizers.

Closing the lighter and tossing it back into the apartment through the open window, John listened until he could hear the faint echoing wail of sirens headed for the river.  Not his problem, that night, yet his head still felt heavy as he climbed back inside to try to get some sleep, after all.  Reaching for the volume dial on the radio, John froze as a startled announcement came from one of the squad cars.

“…come again, Unit 41?”

“I _said_ , we’ve got a giant BAT down here, already,” the car repeated, and John’s conversations with the kids swam back to his mind, along with the front page photo. 

“All units, be advised, unauthorized   
personnel has entered the scene.    
If possible, bring the Bat in, as well.”

As he listened, the fight was broken up almost entirely due to the Batman vigilante, who John knew would now end up on the wanted list since he’d swung himself away before any of the four squad units could get ahold of him—or her.  _Great_ , he thought as he switched the radio off and flopped backwards onto his mattress.  Now the Peace Service would be focused on catching some costumed vigilante, distracting everyone from all of the tensions building behind the scenes that were inevitably going to boil over into an interspecies war thanks to Court nonsense.  Maybe the Batman _was_ fae, after all.  Maybe he was a Seelie, making sure they kept their attentions elsewhere. 

Even with his eyes closed, john couldn’t stop the possibilities from flying around his brain, adding to the rest of the week’s concerns.  A few minutes and several failed sleeping positions later, and he tugged his blanket free of the bed’s corners, dragging it with him to the main room of his apartment, dropping his body onto the ragged couch.  With a click to the remote with his tow, the late-night news flickered to life on the TV screen.

                “Well, it’s just unprecedented, Joni,” an anchor was responding to something his partner had said, John guessed.  The scrolling crawler at the bottom of the screen had him doing a double take. 

                “Reports say Unseelie Court without king—first time in recorded history.”

                “We typically see the results of power turnovers, sometimes even get a name and a face, but this?”

Joni, late night’s co-anchor, shuffled a few papers on her desk while shaking her head.

                “We’ll have to see how this pans out, Stan, but we’re already getting reports of unrest in the southern boroughs, just a few hours into the news leaking onto the internet.”

Images and video of street fights like the one at the docks danced across the screen, and John turned the set off with a frustrated smash of the button.  “Fuck,” he spoke aloud to no one but himself.  Flopping back on the couch, feet poking out of the blanket, John stared at the ceiling.  Without the help of the TV to drown them out, he spent another hour or more with his thoughts before moving back to bed in frustration.

_BEEP-BEEP!                         BEEP-BEEP!_

Groggily, John banged his hand around to the side, hitting only sheet and pillow at first, until finally smashing down onto the button to turn the noise of his alarm off.  All of the previous night’s thoughts coalesced beneath sleepy eyelids, and suddenly John sat upright, grabbing his cell phone to text Ross to meet him before their shift.  He had an idea, a crazy, probably dangerous, maybe even stupid and career-ending idea, and he needed to bounce it off of someone first.


	3. Chapter 3

**CHAPTER FOUR**

Stone did not burn. 

The shell of the dark court’s castle’s structure remained, despite the rule-rejecting arsonist’s fire that had swept its interiors. 

Where once there had been a king, and a king’s offering of membership upon sworn fealty, now there was a blackened throne.  Flames since doused, their creator vanished to the wind, those residing in the Unseelie Court still lived, only further resolved. 

At times, to right the world, some would need to be destroyed.

__________*__________*__________

“John…”  Ross’ face looked like he planned on using more words in response to John’s idea, but his mouth stopped moving after forming the first one.

“Look,” John held out his hands across the diner’s table that occupied the space between them, “you _know_ that nothing being done right now is working.”

“…Yeah…”

Shoving half a slice of toast into his mouth and speaking around it, John continued, “And it’s only getting _worse_ with this Batman bull—”

“ _Hell yeah, Batman!_ ” came from across the room, several booths away, and John decided he was talking way too loudly, apparently.

“—shit,” the last word was loosed much more quietly, aimed only for his own and Ross’ earshot.  Shaking his head, he chased the toast with half his mug of coffee.  “See what I mean, though?  Everyone’s all of the sudden paying attention to _this guy_ , and all he’s doing is stirring up more unrest between Court factions.”

Ross hadn’t paused his meal for more than a few words in the midst of John’s tirade, and so had actually finished his plate, piled with no longer necessary silverware as he more gently nursed his first cup of coffee.  John had already drained his mug twice.  “I get the frustration, man, I do,” Ross started, watching as John’s mug was refilled once again, rolling his eyes when the waitress offered to just leave him a pot to pour his own, “but what you’re talking about…” John’s eyes met Ross’ again, and his partner had turned sympathetic.  “It’s crazy talk.  Even _if_ you get in—”

“I can get in,” John argued confidently around the other half of his toast.

Ross waved a hand to dismiss it.  “Even _if_ , what’re you going to do once you’re in?  Like, yeah, they take humans, I know, and there’s stories of humans even gaining rank, but they’re not just going to welcome you like, ‘Here you go, new recruit, this’s our evil plan, _and_ as a _bonus_ , here’s how to stop it!’”  Ross affected his voice like a cartoon villain, overly-nasal and higher-pitched. 

Sitting back against the booth’s worn cushion, John crossed his arms, staring at his coffee for a moment.  “I can’t just do _nothing_ ,” he started, “and you’re gonna tell me that just being on the Peace Service _is_ doing something,” Ross nodded in agreement, “but it’s not enough.  None of it’s enough, and it’s driving me up the fucking wall.”

With a glance to his phone, grimacing at the lockscreen most likely due to the time that had gotten away from them, Ross pulled out his wallet and left enough cash to cover their orders, sliding towards the end of his bench almost before the bills had settled.  “I can’t stop you, but I’m not going with you, and Ramirez won’t touch this.  You’re gonna need to do this off-book, and that means vacation days and a whole lotta balls.”

Sliding to his feet as well, knocking back the last of his coffee to avoid waste, John followed Ross out the exit to the sidewalk on their way to the station.  “I’ve got the days covered,” he held up a folded set of request papers, “and I guess we’ll just have to see about the balls.”

__________*__________*__________

That morning, John had turned in his request for all of his vacation days for that year, as well as the last two years he hadn’t taken a single day, rolled over.  All told, they amounted to a solid month off his beat and three weeks out of the offices.  Captain Ramirez had given him several stern, knowing looks as she’d taken the request, but had signed it all the same.  Two weeks later, he was on his own with his crazy ideas.

Behind the wheel of a beat up and half-rusty sedan he ‘borrowed’ from impound with a quiet agreement from a guard he knew, and dressed in as comfortable and regular ‘street’ clothes as he could muster, John headed south down Lumbard Street, knowing exactly which group to look for.  It wasn’t hard to find any given gang-affiliated folks in the city, and even easier on this street.  Three blocks down, and he pulled into the pothole ridden parking lot of a scrapyard, nearly losing a borrowed tire to a hole in which the grass had grown tall. 

“Ah, yeah,” he spoke with the grinning confidence of knowing his opponents as he slung himself from the car, “if it isn’t my favorite _Assholes_.”

With a spit that was likely heavily laden with some sort of intoxicant or another, one of the first three to approach him sneered in his direction.  “It’s _D’Astros_ , Humie,” corrected the second, the same three double-lined open stars tattooed across the front of his neck.  All of the D’Astros bore the same mark, a pledge to their gang, with another symbol distinguishing some of them as accepted members of the Unseelie Court.  That mark, however, was set into skin in a pigment human eyes weren’t able to pick up without the right light applied. 

“It’s _human_ , man,” John shrugged as he stepped forward.  There were five now, beginning to ring around either side of him, a timeless warning of a beat-down to come, were he not to be careful with his words.  Lucky for John, despite his intentions of winning the moment, a woman walked out from the low-roofed scrap processing garage, and just the sound of her steps seemed enough to quiet the group, who backed up a step away from John nearly in unison. 

Head tilted as she gave John a once-over gaze, the woman folded her arms, hips canted and feet wide.  “What is it you want, Detective?”  A grim smile followed when John’s surprise must have been evident.  “That’s right, you can drive a rust bucket all you want, but we all know who you are.”

John held his arms out, fingers splayed, in a gesture of open nonresistance.  “I’m here to join up.”

Laughter spread quickly through the five who’d approached first, repetitions of his words bringing more of it behind them, even into the warehouse garage to their backs.  It did not, however, reach the woman who kept her eyes on John’s.  “What’s a human cop got to offer the Court?”

“Skills, training, and a hell of a lot of knowledge and familiarity inside this garbage can city.”  He’d expected the question, and meant the insult with as much sincerity as he did affection.

Several silent moments passed, an uncomfortable amount of eye contact as John was tested for resolve, but not only did he leave the encounter with his life—and all limbs and ribs intact—he also left with an address in his hand.  A slip of paper accompanied him in the car, having been handed over with quiet chuckles in the surrounding throats, after an order from the Tana, the woman who had confronted him.  It was every bit as possible that John was being sent for an off-site beat down, or that the D’Astros simply assumed he wouldn’t cut it, and would die later.  Either way, he had to take his chances.  The Courts were, in this way, akin to the exclusive nightclubs that dotted the inner-city landscape; invite only. 

So he and his borrowed-without-permission car headed out of the city, into the surrounding hills north of the outer suburbs, over a ridge and off the highway, guided by his phone’s GPS, into the woods and running out of directions in what looked like a state park without the structure and maintenance of roads and parking areas. 

Sliding the gearstick to park and flicking the ignition off, John closed the GPS app and tapped out a quick text to Ross letting him know he’d gotten where he was going, but if he didn’t hear from him by the next twelve hours, to come looking for him at the address he’d been given.  The message hopped up from the typing window into a tentative blue bubble that then turned green with a small ‘sending…’ below it, until at last the message turned to a red circled ‘x’ and a ‘delivery failure’ message.  Great.  Maybe he should have sent it _before_ his phone suddenly decided that ‘service’ wasn’t a thing it did anymore.  All three bars that had been present all the way up and over the ridge had deserted him, leaving only a lonely cell tower icon with another rather unfriendly little ‘x’ beside it.

Air loosing noisily through his lips, John looked up to see if there were a clearing to walk to and pull the cliché move of waving the device around in the hopes of catching some random waves of satellite service, but rather than seeing the cracked and poorly managed pavement he’d been sure he’d seen riding in, John was startled to find no road at all, no pavement, no blacktop, and a completely different formation of trees than he’d thought he’d glanced at, ringing around where he’d parked.  Rubbing at his eyes, he looked down at the coffee cup sitting in the cup holder below the dash, telling himself it was time to switch to decaf no matter _how_ stressful the situation, because clearly he wasn’t paying full attention to where he was parking. 

Its hinges creaking and echoing strangely off the nearby tree trunks, John swung the car’s door open, stepping out from the driver’s seat, his packed bag slung over his shoulder, and finding that there was no road _behind him_ , either.  He and the car were in a fairly circular clearing of ankle-high grass and weeds, rounded completely by tall trees, the air around and above him completely still.

“…Hello…?” he called, both to make sure his voice still made a sound as well as to test that this were really where he was supposed to be. 

“Hello,” a voice spoke from far too close behind John’s right shoulder.  When he whirled around, he found, of all people, Petri.  “You’re in the right place, don’t worry.”  The kid smiled, and John sensed a not at all subtle amount of smugness behind it.

Squaring off with him, with a breeze at last ruffling the tops of the trees even if it didn’t reach their level, John narrowed his eyes.  “What are _you_ doing here?” 

Tossing what seemed to be a bright green rock in his hand as casually as a grade school kid fiddles with a yoyo, Petri leaned a hip against the chassis of the impound car.  “I infiltrated the Seelie Court… which is much easier to do than infiltrating the _Unseelie_ Court.”  It was a pointed remark, and a knowing, indulgent look was slowly spared John’s way.

“So you’re actually Unseelie.”  Petri nodded affirmation.  “Well good, because that’s why I’m here.”

Rock caught in his hand and held fast, Petri raised a brow.  “You’re still going with that?  Even though Tana and her D’Astros made you in Gotham?  Even though I’m standing right here, telling you you’ve been made, again?”

John started to explain he wasn’t there on any official op, that the GCPS had nothing to do with his presence, and reiterate his desire to join, but was cut off mid-speech by another person joining them.  Rather than rustle through the trees and brush like anyone might expect, it almost seemed to John like a shadow appeared near the edge of the clearing, and that shadow simply materialized into a wiry bodied and scruff-bearded fae who looked far closer to bored than Petri’s nonchalance. 

“You’re talking too long,” a thick, half-scratchy voice drew out, his ‘L’s a bit heavy and ‘R’ rolled.  Not even glancing at Petri, the new man walked right up to John, who was too close to the car to have any room to back up or sidestep, raising his arm, palm facing John.  Even without having experienced it before or seen it in person, John knew what was coming. 

There were some fae who had telepathic ability, extremely rare though it was, and even rumored to be a total hoax of a ruse made up in stories just to make their species _seem_ more superior to humans than they actually were—yet one of those rumors was that just a touch could have a human under their influence.  That outstretched hand was coming for John’s forehead, and he only had a second to start planning his mental resistance before the fae uttered one word with the touch,

“ _Sleep_ ,”

and the world around John went dark.

__________*__________*__________

The moment he was awake again, John swallowed back the initial panic response that came from not being able to _move._   With careful shifts at first, he struggled against the ropes that made up his restraints, snug loops both between and around his wrists, as well as binding at his ankles to keep him tight to a heavy metal chair.  Convincing them he was there to _join_ was looking less and less likely. 

“You may as well not,” called the quiet, scratchy voice from where the stone-encased room opened into a larger passageway.  It matched the fae from the woods, even before John could see him.

“Excuse me while I disagree,” John nearly snorted, yet felt the burn at his wrists from the so far unproductive friction of fiber and skin. 

Coming into the light, his captor cocked his head to the side as he watched John’s movements, eyes travelling slowly between the ropes at his back and moving to hold his gaze.  “What will you do, if you get loose?”  His tone was curious in a way John had never encountered before, tinged with amusement, as if John were some sort of pet or animal in a cage.  “Where will you go?”  When John only offered a look to demonstrate how obvious he felt the question was, the man added, “Humor me.”

“Assuming this all means I’m not welcome here?  I guess I’d go back to the precinct.”

“Ah, yes.”  The man began to circle John’s chair, keeping a buffer of distance that would have kept him from getting hit if John _had_ gotten an arm loose, even though he wasn’t yet close to that.  “Get help.  Perhaps form some sort of... task force in response, yeh?”

Only pausing a moment, disliking the feeling of being mocked, John resumed his tugging and twisting.  “Maybe.”

“Tell me... where do you think you are?”  The voice was behind him, now, echoing softly off of the stone walls as if it came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. 

It was fairly obvious, at least to John’s senses: the ceiling was low; the walls were solid stone; the floor was slightly damp; and the air had that musty scent to it that storm cellars and sub-basements—and Gotham’s subway system—always seemed to have.  Apparently the no-cell-signal ridge they’d invited him to also featured a bomb shelter or something else left off of the GPS mapping app.  Figured that the Unseelies would have themselves a bunker out of city limits.  “Fine, I’ll play along… I’m in some kind of dungeon.” 

The man hummed, coming to a stop in front of John, his arms still simply down at his sides, as if he had no need of them at the moment.  “And were you conscious the entire time you’ve been with us?”

He wanted to answer an automatic yes, but of course it wasn’t.  He knew he’d been knocked out, this dude knew he’d been knocked out, because he was the one who’d done the knocking out, so it wasn’t even a real question.  Those annoyed John more than the others.  “Maybe not, but I know I haven’t lost time.  You can’t have taken me that far.”

“Where we have taken you, young one,” John _hated_ when fae used that, “is not a place that needs the manner of _time_ to arrive.”  Footsteps began to fill the corridor, and John watched a procession of shadows pass by the opening across the room.  Faintly, somewhere farther from them both, footfalls echoed more deeply, heavily, reverberating through the walls and floor, into the soles of John’s boots.

John tried to piece together his semi-conscious recollection of being moved around.  He’d driven to the meeting place, and despite his miss-recollection of the trees and grass, he couldn’t have been unconscious for more than an hour, he felt that in his gut, in the level of soreness he could feel in his shoulders and his knees, and how awake he felt once he’d come to.  Whatever this guy had done to him, it hadn’t lasted longer than an average nap.  Setting his jaw, his shoulders, his knees, he decided to call the bluff.  

“Everyone knows humans can’t go through portals to Sidhe,” he let out, confident he wasn’t going to lose this game, no matter how many stories and old wives tales told human children never to argue with fae because they’d never win.

“Aye.  Humans cannot.”

 _That’s right, asshole.  I know shit, too._ “So you admit you’re full of horseshit.”

“Nothing of the sort.  Sidhe-born blood is needed to pass between the realms.”

That calm, self-satisfied tone was exasperating.  “Exactly, so you can’t possibly have taken me away from Eia.  No more games.”

“No,” a new voice spoke, at which his first captor bowed his head, stepping back from John, though John thought he could see a smile flash his teeth into view.  The words came like the sound of stones ground against one another, resonating as if they were in a deep cavern rather than a room of four close walls and low ceiling.  “No more games.”

Gaze snapping up and to the doorway, aware only then of how those echoing footsteps had come closer, approaching their corridor, before disappearing altogether, John found his eyes widening in shock.  He’d seen fae all his life, elves, too, lived with them, worked around them, had friends born into their families, but what walked into that dungeon room was neither fae nor elven, and it sure as _fuck_ wasn’t human. 

His form was almost comical, in that John was fairly certain he had only seen a shape like his in a comic book about mythical creatures theorized to live on the Sidhe side.  Standing head and shoulders above the fae who’d been talking to John, each of his steps looked as if it should shake John’s chair, send dust into the air from his feet, and greet his ears like thunder, and yet he made no sound as he made his way to face John, having to bow his bald head not to scrape its skin along the uneven rock above them. 

“Jesus _Fuck_ ,” fell out of John’s mouth without his permission.  At least, he heard the words being spoken, and they sounded like they were his own voice, so he assumed he’d spoken them.  Afterwards, he was aware that his mouth had remained open, but seemed incapable of closing it completely even as the imposing form drew closer, stealing all of the air out of the room.

A hum akin to a car engine’s purr issued from the solid wall of muscle and limb in front of John.  “I was told you had more to say for yourself,” the rocks ground further, forming the gravel of words.  “I was also told you sought membership.”

All of John’s careful middle-of-the-night plans flitted somewhere about his brain, refusing to touch down and allow themselves to be mentally read.  Instead, on repeat, his mind only regurgitated the obvious observations of how _enormous_ this man was, and how _impossible_ it was that he existed right then.  Not one scrap of his consciousness was being remotely helpful.  “You…”  The part of John’s brain that operated language was frantically turning itself off and on again as if it could solve the problem his eyes and other senses were experiencing like some sort of glitch in reality.  “What are you?”

If a body made of flesh like stone could bristle in discomfort, then the being in front of John did just that.  “I believe the Eian word is ‘troll’,” he replied, and John’s mind reeled anew, “but I am not fond of it, nor will you find many here who are.” 

 _A troll.  A motherfucking troll._ John felt as if he were in a dream, or worse, transported into the pages of a children’s storybook.  “What, uh,” swallowing did little to help his voice, but John did it several times anyway, “what should I use, then?”

“My name is Bane.” 

“Are you… are you the new king?”  How those news reports managed to swim back to his mind when most of the knowledge in his brain wouldn’t reply to requests for its presence, he wasn’t sure. 

Both men only chuckled quietly at the question, however, and despite not getting an actual reply, John sensed strongly that the answer was ‘no’.  Trying to work his brain around the actual existence of trolls, John fought to find better questions, but was beaten to it.

“How is it,” his first captor began, “that a police officer finds himself offering his services to the Court?  That is, in a manner that doesn’t occupy a back alley.”  A smirk tilted his mouth, despite the big guy not seeming to continue the joke.  Or appreciate it.  Or, maybe, _understand_ it.

Clearing his throat, John shifted his body against the chair, the wood biting into his hamstrings.  “Detective, actually.”  At the raised brows before him, he repeated, “I’m a detective, not an officer.  It’s like, you know, another level up.”

The bearded fae’s mouth curled further.  “Even better.”  Glancing at Bane with the side of his eye, he continued, “Though that word didn’t come up, Petri has been watching you, as well, while you and your partner have been following him.”  He stepped closer again, cold blue eyes staring curiously into John’s.  “Hadn’t you wondered how he was able to elude you so well, for so long, while you had no idea of his double dealings?”

John forced himself to blink, not liking how much those eyes seemed to draw words from his mouth before he could form them properly.  “Well, yeah, but I caught him, though…”

A snort came back at him.  “We are caught when we _wish_ to be.”  At that, the troll—Bane—placed a hand on the fae’s shoulder, who glanced up, nodded, and while not completely sobering his face effectively going silent to allow the other to speak.

 “Barsad has asked you an important question, which you have yet to answer,” rumbled Bane. 

“Yeah,” John acknowledged, swallowing to keep his resolve while speaking directly to Bane, “because it’s a stupid question.”

“Yet I will repeat it.  Where do you think you are?”

“I don’t THINK, I KNOW.  I’m in some dungeon-esque root cellar outside Gotham city limits.  Probably not more than a few miles from where I left my car.  Where YOU’VE been hiding is what I don’t know.”

“I have been here.  My kind is not generally welcome on your side of the divide.”  Giving the fae—Barsad, it seemed—a squeeze to the shoulder, Bane released him, and Barsad walked over to stoop and loosen the ropes that bound John’s ankles.  “You are no longer in your home world, little one.”

John swallowed back a growl that would have helped nothing in the situation.  “I’ve got a name, too, you know.”

“Yes.  Robin John Blake,” Barsad began as he extricated John from the chair, holding his upper arm to keep him steady as he stood with slightly wobbly legs.  His words came as if he were reading them off of an identification card.  “Twenty-six years old, born and raised in Gotham City.  Mother died in a motor vehicle collision, father died in a mob hit.  Spent the rest of your childhood after foster care in a city orphanage, and now you volunteer there in addition to ‘keeping the streets of Gotham safe’ during the day.  Have I missed anything?”

John scowled.  “Fine, so you googled me.  Good job, I’m sure that took you what, five minutes?”

“Show him.”  Ignoring his words, Bane’s low tone carried like a creaking door, and Barsad maneuvered John towards the opening, taking them through a corridor with matching low ceiling as the room they’d left. 

The floor outside was also stone, though larger slabs whose joints and meetings had been worn smooth and vague from the passing of many feet.  John’s arm was held tightly, but not quite painfully, the grip jostling only slightly as they ascended what amounted to about two flights of stairs.  Only then was there sunlight, faint and vaguely wrong, filtering in through gaps in looser stonework.  Once fully outside an arched open doorway, the sky met his eyes cloudy, but with a decidedly lavender hue.  The day looked to be in twilight, but John’s sense of time passed didn’t allow him to feel like it should be twilight. 

Where they exited was a towering stone wall, each side extending out of sight into the dimming light.  Before them, there was a forest, and it was forest as far and deep as John’s eyes could register.  Though the trees resembled the evergreens that littered the northern New Jersey hillsides, they were thicker, older-looking, and their trunks had a pitch that shimmered like black glitter.

“This forest is older than your city,” that scratchy voice murmured beside him.  There was no judgment against Gotham biting through the words, but an implicit reverence for the scene. 

“Yeah, well, trees live for a long time...”

Barsad was in front of him, then, his crystal blue eyes nearly glowing in response to the low ambient light and the shine of bulbs marking the corridor behind where they’d exited.  “Gotham’s trees are to these as humans to fae.”  His face remained impassive, his tone quiet and still, like the forest behind it.  To John, who had grown up around fae his whole life, and even after seeing a troll for the first time, no one had ever seemed quite so much from another world as he did in that moment. 

Mouth gone dry, John worked his jaw to swallow and wet his tongue again.  “Humans can’t...” 

It was as simple as science, and as based as breathing and drinking; humans existed in Eia, and at points where the worlds were close, where individuals of Sidhe heritage could cross over, no human had ever been able.  Many had tried, and some very successful internet video channels documented the many sorts of efforts to make it work, but the barriers simply did not open for humans. 

“Aye,” Barsad spoke as if whispered directly into John’s ear, despite holding his gaze in front of his face, “full-blooded humans cannot pass through.”

“But you _brought me_ here... and here is definitely _not_ Eia...”

“Aye.”  In comparison to their earlier talk, Barsad’s tone was patient, as a teacher with a child during a lesson, waiting for the gears of understanding to click into place.

Steps sounded behind them, large, slow, and echoing, but deliberate.  John was aware, by how he had sneaked his way into the dungeon room before, that the troll could absolutely move without being heard.  John was being given a chance to know what was coming. 

“What do you think, Bane?” Barsad aimed over his shoulder as its opposite became occupied with a large, thick fingered hand.  “Elven... or fae?”

“I—I’m _not_...”

“Enough, little one,” ground an interrupting warning, no harsher than Barsad’s tone, though perhaps less patient.  “It is clear by now, even to you, that your heritage is not completely clean.”

“ _Hey_ , look—” he backed up, knuckles scraping rough-hewn stone where he had only the castle’s wall behind him. 

A chuckle, or what he assumed was the troll version of a chuckle, since it sounded very much like the faint echoes of thunder rolling over distant hills, issued from Bane’s throat.  “Little one—”

“ _John_ ,” he shot back through his teeth, not liking the epithet even if it were quite literally true. 

“— _John_.  It is not a judgement.  Among your kind, neither Barsad nor I are considered ‘clean’, despite unmixed blood.”  Hearing it, John wished he could argue that point, but it was true enough that he didn’t even try.  “My guess would be that one of your parents hailed from Sidhe rather than Eia, hiding that heritage for your sake or their own.  Perhaps with glamour, if you never suspected.”

Standing no longer in their repertoire, John’s knees gave out, sending him sinking to the larger, flatter stones that ringed the edge of the castle wall.  With one fluid motion and a faint ringing sound, Barsad slid a large knife from his boot and leaned to snap it through John’s bonds to free his hands, which at first only flopped down to his sides.  All of his childhood began to flash and play out in his mind’s eye, the little moments of happiness intermingled with the stress and the loss.  All of it seemed so... _normal_.   No arguments he could recall having to do with speciesism, though he could admit he had been too young most of the time to understand much.  And he had _seen_ his dad die... watched the light leave his eyes.  Any glamour over his body would have faded in that same moment. 

His mom, on the other hand, had died in the car with him strapped into the back seat.  He hadn’t seen her once she’d been whisked away by emergency crews, and she’d been cremated—

“My... my mother… maybe.”  The words were hardly more than a murmur on his lips, less to the pair above him than to the air around him.   “It’s... possible.”  With the admission, the very acknowledgement that it _could_ be true, the weight of apparent reality fell down around his shoulders like a downpour of rain.  He was sitting outside the Unseelie castle, in Sidhe, with a fae and a troll having captured him in a failed attempt to secretly join their ranks. 

What a reality.

Wobbling on his way to his feet, John pushed away the rough-hewn hand that reached for his arm to help finish the job.  “I’m fine,” he forced out, the words far less convincing, even to his own ears, than he’d planned.  Making it to lean against the stones, John rubbed over his face, growling at himself.  He’d had such a grand idea of a plan, had seen it like it were a movie, yet he hadn’t accounted for anything like this.  And who could he have?  Who would have ever thought he’d end up a world away, with the story of his history rewritten as he stood there trying desperately not to believe it.

Of course, it wasn’t as if being fae was the _worst_ thing, even half—though it would have to have been kept a secret—but it felt as if reality had broken, just as different as maybe finally believing that, yeah, they weren’t in Eia right then.  His head felt empty.

“When was the last time you had something to eat or drink?”  Suddenly in his space, Bane didn’t so much look concerned as very much in-charge.

Eyes closed, as the forest’s trees seemed to multiply and rotate in his vision as they darkened, John sighed.  “I had coffee this morning; I’m fine.”

Barsad scoffed.  “Coffee is hardly a meal.”

“Well, he didn’t say _meal_ , did he,” John ground his teeth, feeling immediately defensive even under the circumstances. 

With a clearly long-suffering sigh, Bane cuffed the back of Barsad’s head, earning a half sincere glare.  Turning back to the doorway they’d left, Bane motioned to Barsad as he headed back inside.  “Come,” he spoke over his shoulder, the sound bouncing off of the stones he passed as if it were one of them.

Without a direct order, Barsad took firm hold of John’s arm again, pulling him along with him as he followed bane.  The large man ahead of them this time, John had zero chance of seeing what was ahead of them as they moved.  It reminded him of trying to see his way down the highway around Gotham with an eighteen-wheeler directly in front of his car.  Despite trying to pay as much attention as possible, both to know where they might be taking him as well as to form a hypothetical escape route, John found himself as completely lost as if they’d been traveling a maze rather than a castle whose halls made any sort of sense.  Even so, before long they ended up in what seemed to john rather like a cafeteria and kitchen combined.

Brought to a chair at one of over a dozen tables, the loops of John’s separated wrist bonds were finally worked fully off of his hands, their remains tucked into one of Barsad’s pants pockets.

“Thanks,” John spoke absently, rubbing at the friction burns he’d earned from fighting the ties in the chair.  Maybe it was weird to thank someone who’d tied him up to begin with for finally releasing him, but it had come out as automatically as anything else, especially with his head dizzy.  Barsad, for his part, at least didn’t react, leaving him alone with Bane, for the moment.

In no time at all, a glass was being pressed into John’s grasp, and a small plate set beside him.  It _probably_ wasn’t poisoned; there really didn’t seem to be a point, right then.  As such, he took a sniff, catching a fruity scent.  Juice, he guessed.  That made sense—that was what medical staff gave when someone felt faint in doctor’s offices, after all.  Closing his eyes again as the room started to spin, John carefully sipped at the drink, tasting every bit as much fruit as he’d smelled, but not the same kind of fruit that was familiar, or any that he’d ever even heard about in descriptions. 

Even as he swallowed more, his mind brought back old warnings in storybooks and folktales that said never to eat or drink food offered by fae, but with centuries of inter-habitation, those were relegated to fiction by anyone who took anything seriously.  Then again, even humans found ways to drug one another for far less motivation.

Absently, John ate some of the small chunks of bread and cheese off of the table’s plate.  He alternated between the two, drinking and eating, until before he knew it, both were gone, and John felt as if his ears needed to pop.

Bane’s voice had been speaking already, and John’s mind worked hard to catch up with the end of his words.  “There is much to discuss, now.”

John swallowed thickly, trying to remember how exactly one blinked.  “Yeah… yeah I guess there’s more, huh.”

Gotham and everyone in it, hell even all of Eia he’d ever known, felt so very far away, just then.  Farther and further the more the drink settled into his stomach, slowly but steadily warming its way through the rest of his body.  He could feel it in his blood as it pumped through his veins, like a simultaneously warm and cool rush that gained traction with each thump of his heart inside his chest. 

Once again, he was led out of the room by a firm hand, Bane’s, at least as far as he was actually able to tell.  More doorways followed, stairs, twists and turns he barely registered, until fresh air once more entered his lungs.


	4. Chapter 4

_“Come away while the moon's in the woodland,_  
We'll dance and then feast in a dairy.   
Though youngest of all in our good band,   
You are wasting away, little fairy.”

The Fairy Pendant, William Butler Yeats.

__________*__________*__________

“Tell me,” Bane’s voice vibrated the air around them, as if the stone walls refused to absorb its waves at all, leaving only the empty space of the corridor to carry it, “what did you hope to get out of this ‘mission’ of yours?”

John’s fingers and toes had begun to feel different.  Not _wrong_ , exactly, but not entirely _right,_ either.  There was some sort of combination between the sensations of alcohol intoxication and the way in which his body rebelled when he would lie on one limb the wrong way and fall asleep for too long.  His physical sensation of existence felt like the material manifestation of the fuzzy white noise the TV made when it was turned to a channel that didn’t exist. 

They had come to an elevated hall, what might have been a catwalk between tower sections if it hadn’t been for the walls and roof that accompanied it.  Several meters out from each tower end, those side walls opened up in regular intervals with glass-less window arches that looked out one side on the forest that stretched out from the edge of the grounds and the other to the multileveled roofs and parapets of the rest of the castle that rambled on incomprehensibly. 

Bane’s words had come to his ears already, but his brain refused to process them until he found his shoulder nudged by an elbow twice its size.  Eyes snapping too fast back away from the window, John had to hold his head for a moment while Bane leaned against one of the stone windowsills, taking up the entirety of its space and blocking all light from its opening. 

“I… mission?”  Maybe he couldn’t form a coherent intentional thoughts, but damn if all of his planning and conceptualizations for this trip didn’t come swimming to the fore of his mind as if a magnet had been set at his forehead.  “I wanted to get _in_ ,” he continued, his throat, teeth, and tongue operating on their own set of orders and not quite matching up with one another, “to be in the Unseelie Court so I could learn what was going on in Gotham, and what the plans were to battle the Seelies.”

John automatically looked out the window once more, searching for storm clouds, before realizing the rumble he’d heard had come from Bane.  Something between a hum and a chuckle was his first response.  “And?”

“And what?” John leaned against the opposite wall, in the span of shadow created by Bane’s massive form. 

That form rose from having been half-seated, standing full height, the window having no chance to compete with his shoulders, and his head fighting with the ceiling for space.  “And what then?  Once you’d learned.”

Almost seeming an impossible task for their bulk, trunk-like arms folded and crossed one another in front of the equally massive chest.  The effect was as if he had added an entire other person who was _also_ imposing to his aesthetic.  John found himself wholly distracted by the movement, by the catch of the light on and around him as an unseen sun somewhere set below the expansive horizon. 

“I’d… uhm,” he paused, eyes following the line of Bane’s jaw as it seemed to rise higher and higher off the ground while the man walked towards him.  Legs as thick as John’s waist, he crossed the corridor in less than three steps, so close that John could smell the somewhat mossy scent to Bane’s skin.  Only the faintest of green tinges found their way to the surface here and there, in shadowy spaces, and the texture looked as if it might feel much like John’s own skin, simply rougher, calloused.  Yet despite the similarities, Bane smelled of earth, of water, and of fresh growth. 

Uncrossing his arms, Bane reached out towards John’s head, hands landing on either side of it.  His instinct would have been to evade that touch, to duck and run, but his body refused to operate at the same speed as his mind, and his mind was already running far too slowly.  He shivered at the contact and even further at its consequence, feeling as if a bubble that had been blown over his body, unbeknownst to him, had just been popped. 

 _This_ he’d heard described.  Glamour being broken. 

“This was strong,” Bane commented, not stating outright that the magic had been there, but acknowledging it all the same.  “Someone highly skilled must have placed it on you.  Neither parent, or it would have broken once they passed.”  His hands were no longer against John’s skin, but they remained close, Bane’s body occupying all of the space before him.  “My species does not have the ability to _apply_ spells such as glamour, we have been known to be particularly skilled at breaking them, given the opportunity,” he seemed amused, then, “and the proximity.”

 “What did you _do_ …?”  Though he asked, John was fairly certain he already knew, even if he didn’t want to.

Bane touched his ear directly, and the contact felt like lightning to John’s nerves, like a part of his body that had never once been touched, and he realized slowly that it hadn’t.

“That’s better,” Bane assessed.

Reaching a trembling hand upward, John touched his other ear, and promptly felt himself panic.  His ears were longer by at least an inch, terminating in a curved point rather than their previously arced round tip.  “The fuck?”

Bane’s mouth twitched, two fingers resting beneath John’s chin to raise it.  “Such a mouth on you.”

This time, John managed to quickly move away, squirming along the wall to get breathing space, though the sudden movement made the stones beneath them swim in an unpleasant swirl.  “What-what did you drug me with?”

“You are only now asking?” Bane hadn’t followed him, remaining unmoved save for his head having turned to watch.

“I knew you did something,” John’s breath had become ragged, his heart speeding, “but now I want to know _what._ ”

Bane’s shoulders shifted.  “It is nothing toxic.”

“Bullshit.”  John reached a hand to the side, missing the wall twice before landing against it.  “It’s making my whole body feel wrong.”  It was an understatement, but no less true.

“The herbs are natural, here.  But, as I suspect you are focusing on, the sensation you are experiencing is your humanity ebbing away.”

John’s head snapped up, a horrible decision but a reflex that sent his brain sloshing inside his head.  “My _WHAT_?”

“There is a reason humans cannot cross into Sidhe,” Bane explained, still having moved no closer, “humanity, such as it is, does not, and cannot, exist here.”

Blinking slowly, forcefully, John worked to keep his head clear, feeling the buzz just beneath his skin even louder now that Bane had broken the glamour. “So you... you’re killing me?  After all that?”

“That’s a dramatic way of looking at it,” Barsad spoke up from behind John. He hadn’t heard him approach, nor sensed any other presences in the corridor, as if he’d materialized out of thin air.  It seemed to be a natural talent he possessed.

Dizzier after turning to face Barsad only to turn back when the fae walked over to stand beside Bane, John reached for the wall again, the cool stone registering in his skin’s nerves but not having any positive effect. “But you are,” the buzzing had turned to a burn, and he grimaced, “you’re killing me... poisoning the human part?”

“The longer you remained here,” Barsad began, both of them watching him as calmly as someone might watch idly passing car traffic, “it would have been slowly altered, little by little, as it is. What we have done is simply speed the process.”

“Food and drink native to Sidhe has a unique effect on human DNA,” Bane explained, his voice less like words and more and more like a distant roll and rumble as John’s hearing shifted, his vision blurring more intensely.  “The spaces and differences between the human and the fae become blurred by staying here, eating and drinking.  You can still claim humanity, as many do, but your fae heritage will dominate, now.”

“A full blooded human in your shoes would have the same process and result… if they didn’t simply perish from the change, first.”  Barsad didn’t seem the least bit bothered by his words, nor could he know the way they slowed, distorted, and droned in John’s ears.

John’s knee smacked stone, the sharp pain of its impact his only realization that he had dropped to a kneeling position. A whirlpool might as well have been sloshing around his thoughts, physically tugging at his brain, for all the clarity he couldn’t keep or regain. Steadily, he couldn’t keep his eyes open, and instead of blurry stone and two pairs of worn boots, his memory took over his vision.  Ross, his station, the boys at the orphanage, Fr. Reilly and his ever growing collection of stress-induced wrinkles, all of Brother Michael’s lessons, and behind them all, the lit expanse of Gotham City, an interchanging conglomerate of every high-pointed view he had ever seen of its buildings and streets.  

Its light grew, shining from every window, washing out shadows and shapes until every structure was radiating white, until there was nothing but blinding white that seemed to come every bit as much from behind his eyes as in front. Searing sharpness joined the fire coursing through his veins, and John imagined, in the back of his mind, that he was burning up from the inside out. With a lurch deep in his stomach, John pitched forward, only the most vaguely aware that he was caught above the stone floor before he registered nothing at all. Again.

__________*__________*__________

Some part of John was aware that he had been carried off from where he had collapsed. He couldn’t explain how he knew, even to himself, but despite a lack of conscious control of his body or his senses, he knew he had been taken back down into lower levels of the castle before being settled on some sort of cot.

_Images of memories, snapshots of events and persons long gone flashed through John’s mind’s eye, burning brightly before dimming once more, like photographs set ablaze and left to flicker themselves out.  He saw the crowd of students and peers at his academy graduation, but felt removed, as if he himself hadn’t been there.  He saw the boys he shared a boarding room with at St. Swithin’s, saw their lessons, saw their teachers, yet his seat was empty.  He saw his foster homes, peaceful and quiet without extra household members.  He saw his home, his first home, the apartment in the south of the city where he had lived with his mom and his dad.  It all looked the same, in a moment, but she was different.  Trying to get a closer view only blurred the image in his mind, but he could see her ears, her long, pointed ears, for a split second in perfect focus before it, like all other images, dissolved and faded away._

Whether he had truly been asleep or not, consciousness found John like a bucket of ice water to the face. Gasping for breath, he felt his body tense and curl towards his side, the raging fire in his veins and nerve endings having dissipated but left behind its prickly tingle.

When he at last felt able to open his eyes, he found himself in something like a hospital room.  Rather than bare stone, the walls had been covered over with drywall and paint, and a normal enough sheet had been placed over him on the cot.  Still blurry coming from the brighter corridor, someone he hadn’t yet seen walked briskly into the room, stuck a stethoscope over his skin, squeezed his wrist and peered at a wristwatch counting as they went.  The checkup was done before he had enough speech to complain, but he spotted his bag in the corner of the room when the—nurse? doctor?—left again. 

John barely had time to swing his legs slowly over the edge of the cot, gritting his teeth to be sure his head wouldn’t loll or slosh in the process, before Bane walked in.  Even here, where John could only imagine he felt mostly at home, he still had to duck through the doorway.

“Good,” he assessed, looking John up and down.  “You are up.”

Suddenly finding himself more than a little aware of the fact that, somewhere along the line, he’d lost both shirts he’d been wearing when he arrived, John scrambled his hands along the cot.  Checking under the sheet he’d flung off to sit up, he found his tee, quickly tugging it over his head and shoving his arms through.  Only as he settled the fabric at his waist did it register that he truly no longer felt nauseated or dizzy at all.  Not that _everything_ was fixed, and not that he was certain that was, after all, a good thing.

His mind had become a tangled mess of fuzzy blanks, places where he knew memories and awareness should be, but they weren’t.  “What happened?”  Even his voice was just enough WRONG to his ears to catch his groggy attention. Yet it was his voice, he could feel it vibrate inside his throat.

“Your body has begun to accept its individuality,” Bane began, as if those words made sense together, “what once was distinctly human is now neither wholly human nor truly fae, and the rest, as you felt,” a gesture towards John’s ears, “has come to the fore.”  Despite his body filling the entire room save for a small bit of space in front of the cot, something about Bane didn’t seem as strange as before, not as out of place.

“Yeah,” John replied, his voice flat, dropping uselessly to the wood-boarded floor beneath his socks-only feet.

Several moments passed in silence before Bane spoke again.  “You wish to learn about the Court, do you not?”

 _Is this a trick question?_ John thought, naturally suspicious even before being tricked and drugged.  But it was true, anyway, and he indicated as much as he shoved his feet into his boots, making short work of lacing them up.

“Then you should _see_ the Court.”  Waiting until John had stood, watching to be sure he was stable, Bane led him out of the room.


	5. Chapter 5

Light was purity.  _At least, to Seelies._

In light, one could find guidance, direction, singularity of vision, and divination.

Darkness was equality.  _In the eyes of Unseelies._

In darkness, differences were inconsequential, there was safety and reason to work together.

__________*__________*__________

Apparently, not all of the castle held that stone-and-mortar aesthetic, as they passed through similarly formed walls as John’s recovery room, completed halls, and several common areas that reminded John of how St. Swithin’s might have looked if they’d ever had funding.  And that was only within one wing.  They saw four before Bane turned back towards the central section. 

Most lessons about the Courts assumed that their castles were figurative, but the rambling structure was as literal as could be.  None of those lessons had included how much diversity met John’s eyes, either.  There was an equally represented presence of fae and elves, and several species that John couldn’t name—though Bane seemed to be the only resident troll—as well as representatives of more Eian ethnicities than John could even have named.  Gotham held a population of multiple backgrounds, but most areas kept to their own, even so. 

There were more children than he expected, as well.  Bane had caught him staring at a group running down a branching hallway and into a small courtyard.

“Children are often not cared for, not valued on your side of the divide,” he spoke quietly, watching the kids, as well, with a spark of light in his eyes.  “Often enough, these children run away from their homes in Eia and find the Court and its peoples.”  He swept a hand out to indicate the playful group.  “They end up here.”

They’d kept walking, then, but John could still hear the kids, and his mind was drawn to all of the children in Gotham who had either been born on or ended up living in the streets, in squalor, for lack of organized resources.  That, and a caring government. 

“What about _human_ kids?”

“Those, too,” Bane nodded.  “The same way in which you are now taken care of, so that Sidhe will not make you ill.”  When John didn’t understand, he added, “You would not be able to continue eating and drinking resources from this world with human DNA still operating half of your being.”

John’s jaw drew tight as they walked.  “So,” he accused, his voice flat, “you’ve poisoned all of them.”

“No.”  Stopping once again, Bane held his arm out in front of John, gesturing to another finished room.  Inside, children were playing happily, squealing in a game of tag, others sharing their toys, still others in a different end reading books, writing at desks.  It was a slice of normalcy within the alien.  “We have given them a second chance at life.  A chance the Seelie Court would see taken from them just as quickly as a breath.”  The outstretched hand closed into a fist, as if to demonstrate.

For several moments, John just watched, allowed to do so quietly.  In the back of his mind, he couldn’t help thinking of his newfound heritage, of the mix of blood in his veins, and how if St. Swithin’s hadn’t taken him, if someone had not hidden his appearance all these years, he would have been one of those children facing either death or a place in this castle. 

“It should be like this.”  Still facing the room, his words were quiet, betraying his lips without permission to leave, and remaining almost more to himself than to Bane.

“What should?”

“All of it.”  Face turning sour, John shook his head, leaving the edge of the room to lean against the corridor’s wall further down, running a hand over his cheek.  “Every city, all areas, every encounter between children of different species... it should be like _that._ ”  With a pointed finger, he gestured emphatically back up to the doorway, from which he could still hear the sounds of play.  “There’s no good reason why it shouldn’t be.” 

Bane leaned beside him for a moment.  “On this, we agree.”

Running a hand back over his head, John scratched at his neck, carefully avoiding the ears that weren’t used to him just yet.  “But you can’t just... you can’t kill everyone who thinks differently from you.” 

“On that, we do not agree.”

John let out a forceful sigh, as if expelling the concept from his lungs, no matter that it wasn’t his own.  “It’s not that _simple_.”

Beside him, in his peripheral vision, Bane rumbled low in his throat.  “No, it’s not.”  For a few seconds, he was silent.  “But at times, complicated choices must be made.  Choices between life and death, between equality and segregation, between peace by bloody sacrifice or never-ending war.” 

Wincing as it struck hard, rough, stone bricks, John let his head fall back against the wall.  “What do you expect from me?”  It wasn’t as if he could ever see eye to eye with that kind of thought, and Bane had to know that, if they’d been watching him through Petri already.  “And how are you taking this much time with me, when you’re supposed to be leading an army or something?”

Chuckling, Bane affirmed John’s earlier assumption, “I am not king, little one.  Another is in charge of such things, of our people.”

Glancing at Bane with the side of his eye, John looked over him.  “But you’re clearly the strongest... and everyone’s afraid of you... how are you NOT king?  And I thought there _was_ no king?”

“There is not.”  Bane chuckled, clearly amused with himself, and then regarded John quietly for a moment.  “Not all of being a leader lies in brute force.”

Letting the problem of ‘king or no king’ go for the moment, John rolled his eyes.  “Yeah, I know that.”

“Do you?”  Holding an arm out, Bane got them started down the hall again.  “I know that Eian eyes hold a certain view of us here, of our presence in their world, of the ways in which we operate, but there are points they willfully miss.”

Walking with his arms crossed, hands tucked under his armpits, John didn’t like the feelings that were tugging at his mind and inside his chest.  “What points?  That you _sometimes_ save kids?”  It was flippant, cold, far colder than he’d felt watching that room of youngsters, but he couldn’t let his guard down just because something was different from how he’d expected.  “You think that outweighs the wars and their casualties that have gone on for centuries?”

They turned a corner, more of a curve, really, where the floor began to slope downward.  His heartbeat skipped and then quickened, imagining he was simply being brought back down to the dungeon room in which he’d started.

“If it were possible not to fight,” Bane spoke without turning his head or even glancing away from the path before them, “we would have stopped long ago.”

John snorted.  “Bullshit.” 

Stopping fast in his tracks, despite the momentum of such a sizable form, Bane turned on John, stepping and leaning so closely that John’s back was bitten into by the wall in half the blink of an eye, his head tilted severely upward to be able to see the man’s face.  “Have you never felt the burden of confrontation you would rather not engage?  Have you, a police officer, a detective, never fired your weapon in a moment of necessity, in order to save more lives than the one you might take?  Have you not witnessed others do the same?”

John worked to keep his body from shaking at the ferocity in Bane’s eyes, the lack of space between them, the way in which all he could see was his face, all he could hear was the quiet, restrained thunder of his voice and the pace of his breath, and all he could smell was the scent of him, somehow stronger for his agitation.  “Yes,” was all he could get out before his throat ran dry, threatening to squeak if he dared employ it further.

Bane nodded, looking John up and down, taking a moment before he spoke again, this time with a straighter spine and a smoother rumble to his words.  “Then at least part of you understands.” 

Stepping back, Bane turned from John, making his way further down the hallway with John forcing his legs to cooperate as he scrambled to catch up.  “What you do not see, what your Seelie council members and their wealthy benefactors do not allow your media to tell you, is that this war is not one of petty differences.” 

With the floor at last leveling out, Bane paused outside a doorway before gesturing for John to enter first.  Inside, he found a library.  The room itself was somewhat of a hexagonal shape, the bottom panel of which held the door, and the top a row of windows.  Each of the other four walls was taken over completely by floor to ceiling bookshelves, every one filled to capacity. 

“We have kept dutiful record of our history,” Bane paused to speak quietly to the only man who had been in the room before them.  The man nodded and proceeded to scale a ladder on wheels, dragging a thick volume from near the top shelf to their left, and carrying it down to a table where Bane brought John.  Without a word, the man left them alone in the room.  “This,” Bane opened the volume, which contained illustrations the likes of which might have been found in a museum of the dark ages of Eian history, “this is what we have had to live with and respond to.” 

Turning the pages slowly, Bane set a pace so that John could see each illustration, every section clearly on a different conflict despite not being in a language he could read.  He absorbed them as best he could, finally turning away before the tome was complete, his head swimming from the idea of such pointed and specific conflict over so long, and so full of blood.  Brother Michael’s lessons had never gone into such a bitter tasting detail.

“Stop.”  John leaned his back against the table’s thick plank top, the panel of it likely barely shaped since it had been sliced from whatever tree it came from.  He closed his eyes, the images filling his mind, but also overlaying all of the violence and atrocities he’d witness in Gotham City, in his lifetime, to others and to himself.  Their weight was heavy on his heart, their cacophonous noise deafening in his head. 

“I don’t want to see any more,” he told Bane, barely murmuring the words.  Even so, he heard the book thump closed behind him, and knew he’d been heard.

“No one does,” Bane’s voice was the softest John had yet heard it, softer than he would have thought possible for his form, his species.  “And that is why we must do something more than simply accept it, more than placing bandages on gaping wounds.”

They were John’s own words, coming back to him there, on the other side of the worlds, about the very same subject and problem, and they came as a slap to the face.  Part of his brain briefly wondered if he’d been bugged all this time, but that seemed paranoid even after all he’d gone through.  It simply didn’t seem right that he should have so much in common, ideologically, with a leader of the fucking Unseelie Court.

Having let the quiet remain for several moments, Bane broke it while placing a hand as large as John’s entire head to rest overtop of his shoulder.  “We are not so different, Detective.”  It was the first time he’d been addressed as anything but a diminutive, and the difference caught all of John’s attention, raising his eyes to meet the grey storm clouds that occupied Bane’s.  “I simply know how far I must go, and am willing to weather the journey.”

John shook his head, not agreeing, but he could barely feel the movement.  Nothing felt real just then, not where he was, not how he’d gotten there, not his feet on the thick carpet between them and the cold stone floor, not the castle around them, nor the seemingly endless forest that surrounded it.  Not even his life back in Gotham felt close to his fingertips, as if a glass wall stood between his consciousness and it all, seen but untouchable.  His very body felt beyond his control, a puppet on strings of which he barely understood the grasp.  So when Bane’s hand cupped his chin, when his gaze was held and searched, ducking away and running was not a thought of action that immediately occupied his mind. 

“You are strung between two worlds,” that soft tone continued, barely a breath between full, grey- and pink-tinged lips and John’s ears, “two ideals, and you choose neither, convincing yourself that you are somehow not, simultaneously, choosing whichever side has the power to grow unchecked, allowing it to continue and spread, simply by not standing fast.”

Though he heard the words, John’s mind refused to form an argument, an argument he was quite certain he should have had, should have been able to conjure.  Instead, he felt his brow furrow, aware that his eyes had dropped to that speaking mouth, but unable to raise their attentions.

The grip on his chin shifted, a wide and calloused thumb tapping along his jaw.  “You are lukewarm water, running neither hot nor cold despite being capable of both.”  Bane was closer, then, his breath an easy warmth that brushed John’s hair with each exhale.  “All that you are capable of, the fire that lives within you, and yet you choose not to commit to either side, one way or the other.”  A sneer twisted his lips, sending a pang to John’s gut.  “Survival is not the only importance,” he continued, closer, the bulk of his frame beginning to lean into John’s.  “It would be better that you commit yourself, one way or the other, to actually _feel_ what you believe inside, some manner of conviction, than to stand there pushing away the extremes around you, head down, simply _existing_ as if that very existence you occupy is not affected by and has no effect on everything else around you.”

Breath left John’s lungs in a rush, as violently as the words reverberated in his brain. 

“You asked how I could spend this time with you,” Bane began anew, his voice retaining the soft quality but changed, less a scolding and turned to something John couldn’t quite identify.  Swallowing, he only nodded to let Bane continue.  “I am not the king, no matter how allowing that image to scare our enemies is beneficial.  I serve our true leader, as I once did before the last was taken from us.  And you,” the fingers on his jaw tightened, not painfully, but a pinch enough to arrest him, to steal his gaze upwards once more, “you fascinate me.”

“What?”  John wasn’t certain the word actually left his lips until it earned a half smile above him.

“There is such potential in you, such anger and passion, an intensity that you hold back rather than using to fight what you decry.”  All at once, or perhaps steadily all along, Bane’s body was pressed against John’s, leaned forward to account for his height, but leaving hardly any space unoccupied.  Nearly disappearing altogether, Bane’s voice dropped low, slipping into the air and riding like a breeze to John’s ears.  “I wish to direct it.”

Strangely, to the alarm of some piece of his mind behind a thick and obscuring haze, John did not feel the urge to run.  Neither fight nor flight rose in response, and something quite the opposite of either rose into his throat like a buoy.  Refusing to consciously equate the action with choosing a side, it was John who closed the distance, who pressed his lips to the full, wider set above them, who craned his neck to reach the man’s face.  It was John who raised his arms, no longer protecting nor hiding himself, reaching to hold around the back of Bane’s neck to keep him in reach. 

He needn’t have worried. 

With no apparent desire to pull back, Bane only slipped thick arms around John’s frame, squeezing just enough to lift him and maneuver him to sit on the table rather than lean against it.  The release of pressure against his back was an instant benefit, but a nagging tugged at his consciousness as his knees were parted in favor of Bane retaining the closeness he had started.  Conflicting sensations grappled for his attention—the difference in the sizes of their mouths; the almost metallic taste of Bane’s tongue as it pressed between John’s lips; the rough texture of his skin beneath John’s fingertips; the breathless lack of space around his body; the way in which Bane’s arms cinched around his back, precluding any escape; the steady shift of blood inside his body as it divided itself between his head and his groin.

One of those locations was removed from the equation the instant firm, wide, thick hips pressed forward in the same motion of Bane’s arms tugging John to the very edge of the table’s plane, nearly off its edge in the process.  The result was a slow, dry grind that sent a thrill through John’s nerves that he hadn’t put himself in a position to feel in years.  A groan easing from his throat, he knew he needed to extricate himself right then, or he’d be lost to the choice of staying put. 

“I can’t,” was almost lost to the fraction of space John had managed to gain between their mouths.  The voice barely sounded like his own, raw and breathless.  Even with room beyond his own lips, Bane’s form still filled the entirety of his vision. 

No other space had opened up between them.  “You certainly can,” Bane argued, though not trying to reinstate the kiss, or grind against him again, “if you _want_ to.”

John had once heard a factoid that a hummingbird’s heart could beat over one thousand times per minute, and while he knew his wasn’t truly giving that a run for its money, the number came to mind as it was speeding far faster than he felt he had control over.  Swallowing carefully, only trying to catch enough breath to speak, he let his hands drop from around Bane’s neck, though almost of their own volition they remained against his skin as they fell, settling on either side of his wide torso.  Only then did his mind dimly question why he had yet to see the man wear a shirt.  “Are you talking about fucking you, or choosing to actually side with the Court?”

A quick glance that John quickly took back showed a near twinkle to Bane’s eyes. 

“Either… both.  Are they not each equally true?”

With its counterpart remaining firmly and fast in place, one of Bane’s hands left its place around John’s back, leaving him feeling a shudder’s worth colder despite his skin not feeling overly heated to the touch.  Freed fingers found John’s ear, touching over it in a surprisingly teasing manner.  It sent shivers through him, a tickle reaction, and he jerked his head back and away from the contact.  Great, so _that_ was a thing.

“ _HEY_ ,” he scolded, “don’t do that.”

“Do what,” a teasing tone dominated even the low register of Bane’s voice, and John felt even further out of his element, “this?”  Again, he brushed rough fingertips over the shell of John’s only-recently-pointed ear, causing him to shudder and push at Bane’s sides.  The chuckle that followed sent a scowl over John’s face.  “They are new to you, yet… the sensitivity will fade, with time.”

It hit him, then.

“If I go back, it’s going to be as a fae.”  _And all that comes with that_ , he left unsaid.

Drawing the top of his body back, though remaining as close to the table as before, Bane nodded.  “This shift to your DNA is permanent, as is your knowledge of your heritage.”

Currently, there were no fae on the GCPS.  It wasn’t so much that they weren’t _allowed_ , but there simply weren’t a lot fae pounding down the door with applications to get a job where they’d need to settle disputes between possibly Court-affiliated groups throughout the city.  John had met fae and elves working the Department of Public Welfare, social workers, city court officials, lawyers, and staff at other orphanages, but he’d yet to see a fae cop.  He could be the first.

Of course, going back empty-handed _and_ pointy-eared didn’t seem too appealing.

“I don’t suppose you’re willing to tell me exactly what you guys have planned, even if I don’t promise to join you in it, huh.”  It was flat, flippant, and he was half tempted to flop back on the table if it wouldn’t undoubtedly be a painful move—that, and appear like an invitation, given Bane’s current position in front of him.

Bane was silent for several moments, watching John but not seeming entirely focused on him, even so.  When he did speak, there was a less playful look in his eyes, and a lower set to his shoulders.  “We have a good number of spies inside the Seelie Court.  Some have been there for decades, others a few short years.  You needn’t know how many, who, or where.”

John only nodded a little in agreement.

“Much as ourselves, their Court uses a marking system to brand their own.  However,” a sneer tugged at one corner of Bane’s mouth, “in their mistrust, they choose a method that must be reapplied every few years.”

An idea was coming to John, and it left a bitter taste at the back of his tongue.

Fingertips scraped lightly down John’s arm, taking hold of his forearm and turning it over.  “We have introduced a toxin to the particular ink supply that they manufacture.”

“You… you’re poisoning them all?”  John sat back as much as he was capable of sitting back.  “There’s too many… and wouldn’t they already be dying?”

Thumb tapping John’s skin, Bane shook his head.  “We have been with them for decades, remember, had time to build to this moment.”  Eyes cast downward, Bane traced a symbol against John’s skin, the nerves lit up from the scrape of his fingertips.  “The toxin has been introduced steadily, reaching their existing members as well as each new supporter who claims loyalty throughout the cities of Eia.”

“So you’re gonna kill off a bunch of humans who aren’t even part of the Court?  And a bunch of others who might be _part_ of it but not doing anything, themselves?”  John felt his body slowly begin to respond to commands, again, and he let his free hand leave Bane’s side and brace against the table’s top instead.

“Mm.  Humans who pledged themselves to the Seelie Court, who have thrown themselves in with an ideology that opposes diversity, integration, and interspecies relationships, seeking instead to create Eia in their vision of Sidhe—fae and elven only, humans perhaps kept only as a worker class, but their autonomy stripped from them.”  Bane’s hand shook as it held John’s arm, and he let go only just barely before forming a tight fist.  “Any human—and yes, any being—who supports their ways, either in name willfully or through ignorant and silent inaction, thus allowing those wrongs to continue, is complicit and already condemned to the same fate as they.”

Though John hadn’t felt drugged before, even while kissing Bane, a sobering sensation washed over his body from head to toes, cooling whatever fire had been stirred by their contact.  “So, _me_ ,” he pointed out.  “If I don’t choose to help you, I’m going to be collateral damage?”

Bane stepped back, then, leaving enough room between him and the table that John was able to reposition his knees to once again serve as a barrier, which he quickly did.  “You would have been, yes.”

“…Would’ve been?  Not now?”

“No, not now.”  Opening, Bane’s hand twitched, as if it desired to move but was not allowed to do so.  “I told you, Detective, you fascinate me.  It would seem quite the waste to allow you to fall to the same useless fate.”

“Uh… thanks?”  John kept his face a flat affect, his tone dripping in sarcasm.  He wasn’t sure what the appropriate response to a potential mass-murder saying they liked _him_ was, but it definitely couldn’t have been to melt and agree and go along with whatever that person planned and said. 

“I think it’s time you went home, John.”  It was only the second time his name had been said at _all_ since he’d left Gotham, the first in direct address, and in the space of time he tried to figure out how he felt about it coming from the mouth he’d just kissed and then heard a terrifying plan from, they suddenly weren’t alone any longer. 

As if Bane had pressed a button to summon him—at least, John didn’t _think_ he’d actually done that—Barsad stepped into the room.  John watched his hands warily, which only seemed to amuse him.

“You’re just letting me go back?”

“You’ll return with a choice on your head,” Barsad intoned more brightly than the words deserved, a smirk only barely hiding behind his beard.  “Either tell what you know and how you know it, likely starting a sharper conflict which won’t really affect our existing efforts, but may get others hurt or killed in the process, _or_ …”

“…Or I say nothing, hide out, and let this shit go down on its own?” John supplied, feeling his face heat with anger, more so as Barsad spread his hands in an indication that John had guessed correctly.  “Why even let me go, then?”

A ruddy brown brow rose, by the door.  “You are complaining?”

“Because we do not force people to join our ranks against their will,” Bane answered instead. 

John scoffed quietly, his voice flat.  “How benevolent of you.”  Hopping down from the table at last, John smoothed his hands over his clothes, immediately feeling self-conscious with Barsad watching, unsure if the man had already been right outside the door when he’d been moaning against Bane.  He didn’t seem jealous, but that wasn’t a solid enough indicator.

With a step to the side, Bane moved back over to the nearly forgotten book lying on the tabletop, running a hand carefully over its spine.  “You will go home,” he began, very much a pronouncement, “and you will see your world in a new light.”  Nodding to himself, he didn’t even look at John as he made a motion towards Barsad, causing the other man to walk over to John and take hold of his elbow.  “After that, we’ll find what choice you make.”


	6. Chapter 6

There were no official farewells, nor any sort of ceremony to accompany his leaving.  Barsad brought him back to the room he’d been put in, he was allowed to gather his bag, and then they were on their way out of the castle and into the surrounding woods.  Aside from a maelstrom of conflicting thoughts regarding all he had seen and heard, all that had been done, John’s only passing thought was that he’d actually see the forest this time, having not been awake for his entry. 

‘Seeing the forest’ turned out to merely be passing from tree to tree, shrub to stone, following a winding path that John wouldn’t have truly called a path if Barsad hadn’t been following it so smoothly.  Just as he was beginning to wonder if they would be walking through the forest _all day_ , the tree line broke, and John found himself in the same clearing in which he’d arrived, the old impound car right where he’d left it.  Or, at least, so it appeared. 

“Do I just drive towards the trees or what?” he shot at Barsad, noting the lack of a road, the same as when Petri had come to greet him. 

Eyes turned briefly upward, towards the treetops fluttering with a breeze that still didn’t reach where they stood, Barsad otherwise hardly moved.  “When you get in the car, you will find yourself able to leave as you need.”  It seemed unlikely, but so had most of his trip, and so John didn’t argue, only took the returned keys as he was given them.  “A word of caution...”

Having been already stepping towards the car, John turned, finding Barsad still mostly facing him but already at the edge of the trees.  “...Yeah?”

“Your human heritage no longer protects you.  When you’re in Eia, now, iron will burn.  As will many other metals humans so carelessly mix together without thought of the consequences.”  Spoken with the air of personal experience and a clear exhaustion on the topic, the words seemed to weigh the man down.  The most motion John had seen out of him at one time, Barsad leaned to open a snap-pocket on the side of his cargo pants, pulling out a pair of gloves and tossing them to John.  “You will need these,” he added, nodding towards the car, “if you plan on touching that with your hands.  If you are ever uncertain, feel for heat in the air above an object, or try to smell it.  You will save yourself pain and injury.”

Everyone knew about fae being allergic to iron, and yeah, humans were often dicks about it, but John hadn’t thought about how many cars were still made with mixed metals.  He certainly hadn’t given a second thought to touching the door handle, even knowing what he was, now.  There was definitely going to be an adjustment period, among other things. 

“Uhm, thanks.”  From everything he’d dealt with, John had thought Barsad would have rather he simply burn himself over and over to learn that lesson.  Choosing not to question that logic any further, he gave a lame wave and, after donning the gloves, carefully opened the door and slid into the car. 

Barsad hadn’t exaggerated... the moment he looked up from adjusting his body in the seat and tugging the door closed, the world outside his windows once again changed, and he was back in the dilapidated park he’d driven to from the city.  He could also smell the frame of the car around him, a not entirely pleasant sensation. 

Trying to make sense of the last two days made his head ache like a hangover.  Maybe he _was_.  After all, whatever food and drink they’d given him had gone straight to his head.  Rolling his window down as he made his way back towards Gotham, phone finally getting some signal again, John breathed in deeply looking for familiar air.  He found it, the scent of Eia’s plants and forest different from what he’d found in Sidhe, but he was unpleasantly greeted the closer he came to city limits. 

As much as he’d thought smelling the car had been strange and overwhelming, closing in on the city and its structures was nauseating.  Even with the window closed, the scent of metal filled his nostrils as he carefully drove back to his apartment.  He’d intended to bring the car back to impound when he returned, but he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t still need it to get out of the city, and knew his agreement of winked silence with one of the guards there would hold for at least a week or so. 

With a few nauseating turns as he got closer, John made back to his apartment building, up three flights of stairs, and barely had the presence of mind to make sure the door closed behind him before tossing his bag to the floor in a rush to the bathroom.  Nothing was reversible merely by losing to the toilet bowl all of the food and drink his stomach had taken on, of course, but it felt far too sick to be stable all the same.  When he’d finished and washed his mouth and face, his reflection startled him upon straightening in front of the mirror.  It was a subtle change, maybe, but to his own eyes—which had added a brighter brown ring around their outer edges—it was all the difference in the world. 

Poking at his ears, he shivered even at his own light touch.  _The sensitivity will fade with time_ , Bane has said.  He wondered if the same could be said for the way his head and gut felt at being back in the city.  It certainly didn’t seem that every other fae—something in John grimaced at the dissonant change of including himself—suffered from the same effect.  None he’d ever known, especially all of the kids at the orphanage over the years, had seemed to have an issue so long as they didn’t physically _touch_ iron. 

All at once, he was exhausted all over again.  Drying his hands and tossing the towel back on the sink, he chose to ignore his phone, his scanner radio, the television, even his cigarettes in favor of flopping face-first onto his bed.

__________*__________*__________

With his phone ringing, it was not John’s alarm that woke him, but a call from Ross.

“Hey man, you home or what?” came through the speaker almost before John had a chance to get out a groggy greeting.  “Did you decide not to try, after all?”

If he hadn’t still felt dead tired, John would have laughed, but Ross just kept right on talking.  He could hear the sounds of his partner messing around in his kitchen, thankful only that he wasn’t on speaker. 

“Didn’t hear anything from you, but I couldn’t _assume_ that you were off with some gang faction and not just brooding in your apartment, you know?”  Ross cleared his throat on the other end of the call.  “You do that sometimes, John.”

“Yeah,” John groaned out as he forced himself to roll over and make at least a partial effort to sit up on the edge of the bed.  “I know I do.  And I’m fine, I’m just tired.”

Ross seemed to take that to relay that he hadn’t gone at all, as he began to go on about how the last few days had gone for his kids, including a story that had to have been funny at least to him, since he laughed most of the way through it, ending in a chuckle that faded out with a sigh.  John offered a faint laugh of his own, a ‘That’s great, man’, but hoped he wouldn’t be required to remember any of it, later. 

“Alright, I’ll let you off the hook for now, but promise me you’ll check in tomorrow, even just a text, alright?  Whatever you end up doing, I wanna know you’re safe.”  

 _If only you know_ , John left unsaid.  It just wasn’t worth trying to explain anything over the phone.  But he promised, anyway, and tapped to end the call.  Lying back down was more tempting than it had maybe ever been in his life, but he forced himself to stand, anyway.  Sleeping the day away wouldn’t do his muscles any favors, and it certainly wouldn’t help him figure out what he was going to do next. 

Climbing out onto the fire escape, John hissed and winced as he touched the railing with his bare hand.  _Right,_ he reminded himself, _metal._   Avoiding its leverage in favor of lighting a smoke, John looked out over the street and the neighboring rooftops.  The ambience of Gotham around him faded to a sound like the inside of a sea shell, seeming just as far away and impossible to reach as that false sea.  In so many ways, nothing had truly changed since he’d left on his stupid mission, but all the normal little realities—his apartment, the surrounding neighborhood, the cigarette between his fingers, its smoke in his lungs—felt off and ill-fitting, like he was trying to wear someone else’s clothing, someone else’s life. 

It was almost an entire day of being home before his mind would process what he could actually do with the information he had.  As much as he hated to admit it, Barsad’s assessment of what might happen should he raise hell about their plans was probably fairly accurate, but that didn’t mean he was going to sit around and do _nothing_.  Maybe he couldn’t go to Seelies, even if he’d wanted to, to begin with, and maybe he couldn’t even go to Captain Ramirez, but he could talk to Ross.  His partner had been there for him in the past, to ground him, to support him, and John trusted him like no one else. 

That in mind, he sent off a text, asking him to meet at their typical diner, but didn’t include _why_.  Ross quickly replied, and they set a time for the next morning, before Ross’ shift, so long as the kids cooperated with breakfast since it was his turn to get them ready for school. 

John had spent the night not able to sleep, but writing out all of the things he’d seen, heard, and been told into a notebook that he packed with him that next morning.  Of course, there were plenty of things he left out of the notes.  At least half the night had been spent _trying_ to focus on the right things to add while being distracted by his body’s memory of how he’d felt in the library.  How _Bane_ had felt in the library.

His initial plan had been to take the rust bucket to the meet, figuring he could at least get a laugh out of Ross before bringing down his day.  Slinging himself into the driver’s seat, however, he had barely set the key in the ignition before a hand found his shoulder from behind him. 

Freezing, flicking his gaze quickly to the rearview mirror, he found a set of relaxed, icy eyes staring back at him.  Slender fingers pressed into the edge of his collarbone, palm resting firmly on the ridge of his shoulder, giving a squeeze as their eyes met.  “…Barsad…?”

“You didn’t think we would _actually_ let you roam around _telling_ people, did you?”

John worked to control his breathing, to sit still, to try to get a sense of whether or not Barsad had any sort of weapon, if they were truly alone in the car, and then he realized his mistake.  He’d lost that part of the situation before he’d begun—Barsad’s hand was already on his body.  “You let me go,” he reminded him, catching his shoulder before it could droop beneath the touch out of reflex.  John didn’t dare shift his gaze from the mirror, as if he could somehow will Barsad not to move or act if he just kept eye contact.

That turned out to be the worse option.  While he’d thought he’d been holding Barsad’s gaze in some sort of stubborn hypnosis, Barsad had been using that contact and his hand on John’s body to pry into his mind.  “You’ve been thinking of my lover, haven’t you, John?” 

John didn’t need to ask _who_.  While he hadn’t been entirely sure that Bane and Barsad were together, he could feel it through whatever connection Barsad was making.  He could see them.  It wasn’t images, really, so much as it was the feeling of how they were connected.  Through Barsad, he could sense Bane, the way they took care of one another, the way they each felt that no one else would hold the same position for either of them.  And from that, John was startled to sense… himself.  Corresponding to a tick up to each side of Barsad’s lips, John felt the way in which Barsad had found him intriguing, and through that, Bane’s fascination.  A pang shot through his chest in response, and he felt his face warm knowing that Barsad would sense that just the same. 

“Your partner will have to have breakfast without you, today.”  Oh, and apparently he could sense _that,_ as well. 

Before John could argue, move, or even open his mouth to try anything at all, those slender fingers shifted to the right, curling around the side of his neck, skin against skin.

The world fading away as quickly as the word dropped from Barsad’s lips, the last thing John saw was a pair of cold blue eyes crinkle with a smile below them. 

“ _Sleep_.”


End file.
